An appliance connected to a network-may perform numerous tasks, such as load-balancing, for one or more server. The appliance may execute scripts to perform these tasks. One advantage of executing scripts on a network-connected appliance is that it has a complete purview of the application that is delivered to the one or more servers. The appliance may have access to both fine-grained and coarse-grained information available in executing the scripts.
Some servers, such as commodity servers, are capable of handling some of the tasks performed by the appliance. However, servers lack the complete, “global” information. Thus, scripts executed on servers may be limited in functionality.